Continue to Stand With Us

Continue to stand with Tucson well after the cameras leave. Stand with us in thoughts and love and perhaps even bodies and souls, silently walking in peaceful action for peace and justice carrying vigil candles through our streets. Stand with us on your blogs and what seems to be a reconnection for many of us, myself included, that, yes, “Words do matter.” I have written thoughts and words, and fears, and yes, anger, and confusion, and educated guesses, on some front pages and blog comments about what has been happening, what it has “felt like” in AZ, but more so in my Tucson community for this last year.

As a person with strong ties to hippies, and artists, and environmentalists, and feminist groups, the LBGT community, and social and economic justice groups (I know. That is code word for “Commie” according to the talk show host we shall not speak), as well as a sociologist, I am considering getting back out there, and helping to recollect our coalitions: Some of us have scattered in the wind, out of, yes, perhaps, fear, but what we have felt also as our liberal Tucson roots fading from lack of donations to our various non-profits, as well as the silencing that can come, when, yes, “hate” is closing in.

We have a very well respected Public Defender here, Isabel Garcia, that has received her share of death threats along the way. I want to share some of her “voice”, her professional experience and “facts”, a long term resident of our community, a friend of Giffords and Grijalva, a colleague of Judge Roll, a Mexican-America, an immigrants rights advocate, a lawyer that has had, and has had to have, a strong relationship with Pima County Sherif Dupnik, and, I will add with pride, a woman who has bought a piece of my art from a series that explores Matriarchal Consciousness.

Stand with us, in spirit and thoughts, no matter how painful and tiring it might be, for all of us, at this time to continue to hear about this tragedy that has affected our city and nation, and yes, the desperate need that our country desperately needs for civil debate and dialogue. I really hate to say it, but, yes, we very well might indeed be the ones that we have waiting for. That is a Native American prophecy that was spoken in the primaries. It was actually a saying of hope, that I heard and was reminded of in 2008 by Dennis Kucinich while standing at his rally at the YMCA in Tucson, Arizona. You, know, maybe, it just might be, Tucson, AZ, that we all have been waiting for.

This article and Isabel’s comments will say it better, express what we have been experiencing, in our, and to our community, well before the mass killings of a week ago today. Arizona Shooting Means We Have Reached the Limits of the ‘Normal’

Her positions in defense of immigrants makes her a favorite target of Tucson’s radio shock jocks and local Republicans — and Democrats — whose rhetoric and denunciations fueled, she believes, the numerous death threats that she herself has received. “Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before things blew up even more. The anger and fear have become ‘normal’ here.”

Advertisement